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Topic: McCarthy's Southern Works
Thread: Woman of the Apocalypse
 Total messages for all days: 23
Woman of the Apocalypse glass 6/22/2008
Thomas Merton in his book "New Seeds of Contemplation" ends his chapter on the Virgin Mary with a paragraph somewhat suggestive of The Road and the woman who is so glad to see the boy.

"It is she who, in these last days, is destined by the merciful delegation of God to manifest the power He has given to her, because of her poverty, and save the last men living in the ruins of the burnt world. But if the world's last age, by the wickedness of men, is likely to be made the most terrible, yet by the clemency of the Blessed Virgin will it also be, for the poor who have received His mercy, the most victorious and the most joyful." (175)

McCarthy might be making an allusion to Peter Paul Reubens' painting "Woman of the Apocalypse" with the first sentence in the next-to-last paragraph in TR:

"The woman when she saw him put her arms around him and held him."

These sentences from Merton also remind me of the boy:

"It is in these souls that peace is established in the world. They are the strength of the world, because they are the tabernacles of God in the world. They are the ones who keep the universe from being destroyed. They are the little ones. They do not know themselves. The whole earth depends on them. Nobody seems to realize it. They are the ones for whom it was all created in the first place. They shall inherit the land."

"They reach out for us to comprehend our misery and drown it in the tremendous expansion of their own innocence, that washes the world with its light." (288-289)

Probably nothing to it, but I thought it was kind of interesting and wanted to pass it along.



Peter

Woman of the Apocalypse Rick Wallach 6/22/2008
Peter: again, or perhaps as usual, a very intriguing and substantial series of observations.

Now, how do we get you off your lazy backside to write some papers for the McCarthy conferences or sponsored sessions at ALA or the regional MLAs (behind which lies a nefarious plot of mine to second some of your work for one of the books I'm working on)?

Woman of the Apocalypse glass 6/22/2008
Rick,

Wow, very flattering. Thank you. It would be the thrill of a lifetime to write a paper on McCarthy worthy of consideration for a conference or a book. I'd love to give it a go.

Peter

Woman of the Apocalypse Clement 6/23/2008
That is nice indeed Peter. I think it goes a long ways towards rescuing the mystical extinction in extinction that is the man's death scene.

Woman of the Apocalypse blackhiller 6/23/2008
Wow, Glass, great stuff. And highly likely McCarthy read a good bit of Merton, with the Southern Catholic connection and Merton's heyday all coinciding. Write, young(?) man, write.

Woman of the Apocalypse Lee Driver 6/23/2008
Reflections on glass we'll call it, or off glass. Reflect young man, go on reflect.

Would that woman take us all to her breast in these times.

Woman of the Apocalypse ronk 6/23/2008

Woman of the Apocalypse mff8785 6/23/2008
Glass,

Your Merton quotation on the Virgin Mary could open up a few possibilities for an interpretation of Rinthy Holme as well, if one chooses to read her as being a descendant of Lena Grove.

Mike

Woman of the Apocalypse bob g. 6/24/2008
I'm privileged to join this chorus of praise. Go for it, Peter!

Woman of the Apocalypse glass 6/24/2008
Thanks all for the kind words and encouragement. It was a fluke that I picked up the Merton book in the first place as I was looking in my shelves for something else and it sorta popped out at me because I've been thinking a lot lately about Suttree's "devotional meditations" in the woods for the Hallucinogens/McCarthy thread. And I had skipped the Virgin Mary chapter on my first read-through but then remembered some old posts on Bob's "Other Knoxville" thread that mentioned Her so I went back and read it last and was startled out of my Sunday reverie by Merton's "save the last men living in the ruins of the burnt world." And the stuff about "the little ones" is absolutely beautiful and moving to me.

Peter

Woman of the Apocalypse glass 7/1/2008
Maps and Mazes

"This leaf has its own texture and its own pattern of veins and its own holy shape, and the bass and trout hiding in the deep pools of the river are canonized by their beauty and their strength. The lakes hidden among the hills are saints, and the sea too is a saint who praises God without interruption in her majestic dance." Thomas Merton

"They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculite patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes." The Road

With his "maps and mazes," McCarthy might be making an allusion to the Psalter Map, so called because it accompanied a 13th Century copy of the Book of Psalms. The map has east at the top; just below Christ is a depiction of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

Also significant, and neatly connecting the possible allusion McCarthy may be making in the preceding paragraph to Rubens' "Woman of the Apocalypse," in which the Virgin Mary crushes a serpent under her feet, is the depiction of Christ in the Psalter Map trampling dragons under his feet.

In a scholarly paper intriguingly titled "Maps and Mazes," Adele J. Heft of Hunter College said this about the Psalter Map and its allegorical message and apocalyptic overtones:

"The eastern orientation of the Psalter map immediately betrays its allegorical message. At the top of the frame stands Christ, arms uplifted, elbows resting on the world, and flanked by angels. Between his elbows, a wind god releases through its mouth the waters associated in Genesis 2:10-14 with the Garden of Eden. The Garden, in turn, appears below as a circular area, inside of which are Adam and Eve separated by the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Conversely, at the bottom of the frame lurk two dragons representing Satan and his emissaries. On the reverse side of the page containing the Psalter map, Christ is shown trampling the dragons under his feet. Although the map illustrates a Psalter, the imagery is distinctly apocalyptic. Thus east corresponds not only to the earthly paradise and the rising of the sun, but also the resurrection of Christ, the Second Coming, and the everlasting life of the soul in Heaven. West, on the other hand, symbolizes death, the decay of the world, the birthplace of the Anti-Christ, and the eternal damnation of sinners in Hell."

Heft also says of this type of map: "It embodies the fundamental contradictions that characterize these mappaemundi or 'maps of the world,' as medieval writers and map makers grappled for over one thousand years with the problem of reconciling pagan science and experience with Church-sanctioned interpretations of geography and cosmology based upon the Bible."

On mazes, Yale University scholar Craig Wright, in his book "The Maze and the Warrior," suggests that mazes incorporated into church floors and illustrating religious books were symbolic of an epic journey through this sinful world to salvation. A savior figure typically led the way along this harrowing spiritual path.

Some other common thoughts on mazes that resonate with The Road and are nicely exemplified by the Hopi Indians whose symbols constantly exhibit a connection to earth and nature, similar to TR where there are "the brook trout in the streams...in the deep glens." The Hopis' Maze of Human Life is symbolic of the idea that we each come into life with a certain "maze" to run, and that there are challenges and obstacles we meet to complete our spiritual revolution.

According to the Hopi, we do not come into the world empty-handed. Rather, we bring with us "light" lessons and gifts to offer. We let our light shine.

Maps and mazes.

"You could see them standing..."
"...the majestic dance."

Peter

Woman of the Apocalypse glass 7/4/2008
Painter Peter Paul Rubens' philosophy on the interconnectedness of man through the passage of time linked by the eternal breath is shared by the woman who embraces the boy in TR:

"One who has seen the present world has seen all that ever has been
from time everlasting and all that ever will be into eternity... For all things, in a sense, are mutually intertwined, and by virtue of that all are dear to one another; for one thing follows duly upon another because of the tonic movement and the common breath that pervades throughout and the unity of all substance." (Rubens)

"She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time." (The Road)

But always the ambiguity, that hanging on by a thread feeling:
"Sustained by a breath, trembling and brief."
"...each frail breath in the blackness."
"His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath."

Peter

Woman of the Apocalypse glass 7/12/2008
This Thomas Merton poem in which the Virgin takes glass (light) as her lover and as an instrument of death is reminiscent of when the boy's mother in The Road says she has taken death as her lover and uses the glass-like obsidian to commit suicide. The final words of the poem with the "Lamb of Their Apocalypse" might have some allusiveness in TR.


The Blessed Virgin Mary Compared to a Window - Written in 1944

Because my will is simple as a window
And knows no pride of original birth,
It is my life to die, like glass, by light:
Slain in the strong rays of the bridegroom sun.

Because my love is simple as a window
And knows no shame of original dust,
I longed all night, (when I was visible) for dawn my death:
When I would marry day, my Holy Spirit:
And die by transsubstantiation into light.

For light, my lover, steals my life in secret.
I vanish into day, and leave no shadow
But the geometry of my cross,
Whose frame and structure are the strength
By which I die, but only to the earth,
And am uplifted to the sky my life.

When I became the substance of my lover,
(Being obedient, sinless glass)
I love all things that need my lover's life,
And live to give my newborn Morning to your quiet rooms,
-Your rooms, that would be tombs,
Or vaults of night, and death, and terror,
Fill with the clarity of living Heaven,
Shine with the rays of God's Jerusalem:
O shine, bright Sions!

Because I die by brightness and the Holy Spirit,
The sun rejoices in your jail, my kneeling Christian,
(Where even now you weep and grin
To learn, from my simplicity, the strength of faith).

Therefore do not be troubled at the judgements of the thunder,
Stay still and pray, still stay, my other son,
And do not fear the armies and black ramparts
Of the advancing and retreating rains:
I'll let no lightning kill your room's white order.

Although it is the day's last hour,
Look with no fear:
For the torn storm lets in, at the world's rim,
Three streaming rays as straight as Jacob's ladder:

And you shall see the sun, my Son, my Substance,
Come to convince the world of the day's end, and of the night,
Smile to the lovers of the day in smiles of blood;
For though my love, He'll be their Brother,
My light - the Lamb of their Apocalypse.

Woman of the Apocalypse glass 7/12/2008
Another Merton poem "Evening: Zero Weather" from 1947 seems to resonate with the epilogue in Blood Meridian:

This was a day when shovels would have struck
Full flakes of fire out of the land like rock:
And ground cries out like iron beneath our boots
..........

And yet another, "The Flight Into Egypt," from 1944 mentions the title of one of McCarthy's novels:

Go, Child of God, upon the singing desert,
Where, with eyes of flame,
The roaming lion keeps thy road from harm.
........

And one last Merton poem "Hagia Sophia (1963) has parallels with the man when he awakens in the opening sentence of The Road and touches the child; when the child leads him by the hand in the cave; and of the man's last mystical night on earth as the boy watches his father sleep. Goodness finds the little boy in the end but the man has goodness with him always.

"Such is the awakening of one man, one morning, at
the voice of a nurse in the hospital. Awakening out
of languor and darkness, out of helplessness, out of
sleep, newly confronting reality and finding it to be
gentleness." (Merton)

"When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out and touch the child." (The Road)

"He woke in darkness, coughing silently." (TR)

"Who is more little, who is more poor than the helpless
man who lies asleep in his bed without awareness and
without defense? Who is more trusting than
he who must entrust himself each night to sleep?
What is the reward of his trust? Gentleness comes to
him when he is most helpless and awakens him,
refreshed, beginning to be made whole. Love takes him
by the hand, and opens to him the doors of another
life, another day." (Merton)

"In the dream from which he had awakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand." (TR)

"He will have awakened not to conquest and dark pleasure but to the impeccable pure simplicity of One consciousness in all and through all:
one Wisdom, one Child, one Meaning, one Sister." (Thomas Merton)

Peter

Woman of the Apocalypse glass 7/12/2008
In the opening paragraph of Outer Dark, McCarthy shows the grim triune "on the bluff in the late afternoon sun," and as they proceed single file they move "into a fold of blue shadow with light touching them about the head in spurious sanctity..."

McCarthy might be making a strong allusion here to TS Eliot's "Ash Wednesday" and by doing so interconnects the destinies of the trio and Rinthy as a Virgin Mary-type character, with her ever-present folds in her blue dress and the halo of light about her head.

Rinthy has become an unwitting participant in their "nameless black ballet."

"Who walked between the violet and the violet
Who walked between
The various ranks of varied green
Going in white and blue, in Mary's colour,
Talking of trivial things
In ignorance and knowledge of eternal dolour
Who moved among the others as they walked," (Eliot, Ash Wednesday)

Just like the Mary who moves among the others as they walk in Eliot's "Ash Wednesday," Rinthy's "fold of a blue shadow" links her with the evil men and, sadly for her, "they moved in shadow altogether."

The following stanzas from Ash Wednesday show Eliot reinforcing the "folds" metaphor as it relates to the Virgin Mary, neatly linking it to McCarthy's "fold of blue shadow" and the light enveloping the Virgin, which McCarthy has inverted in Outer Dark with the haloed heads of "spurious sanctity" for the Grim Triune in the opening paragraph of the novel. ("The bearded one rose" is also intriguing and a possible Resurrection inversion)

From Eliot:

"Here are the years that walk between, bearing
Away the fiddles and the flutes, restoring
One who moves in the time between sleep and waking, wearing

White light folded, sheathing about her, folded." (Eliot)

The entirety of Outer Dark seems to take place in this shadowy, shapeless, and sometimes nameless, world of Eliot's "time between sleep and waking."

The Grim Triune may also find a parallel with the three white leopards in Ash Wednesday, particularly in the passages where the evil dude(s) kill and barbecue Rinthy's baby:

Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree
In the cool of the day, having fed to satiety
On my legs my heart my liver and that which had been contained
In the hollow round of my skull. (Eliot)

... It is this which recovers
My guts the strings of my eyes and the indigestible portions
Which the leopards reject. The Lady is withdrawn
In a white gown, to contemplation, in a white gown.
Let the whiteness of bones atone to forgetfulness.
There is no life in them. (Eliot)

"And stepping softly with her air of blooded ruin about the glade in a frail agony of grace she trailed her rags through dust and ashes, circling the dead fire, the charred billets and chalk bones, the little calcined ribcage." (Outer Dark 237)

The Lady is withdrawn
In a white gown, to contemplation, in a white gown. (Eliot)

"She did not know what to make of it...She waited through the blue twilight and into the dark...Shadows grew cold across the wood and night rang down upon these lonely figures and after a while little sister was sleeping." (OD 238)

Who walked between the violet and the violet... (Eliot)

...Lady of silences
Calm and distressed (Ash Wednesday)


...Will the veiled sister pray for
Those who walk in darkness, who chose thee and oppose thee,

...Will the veiled sister between the slender
Yew trees pray for those who offend her (Ash Wednesday)

Peter

Woman of the Apocalypse glass 7/12/2008
Also highly suggestive of Rinthy as Mary/Sister is early on in Outer Dark when the tinker comes calling and tries to sell Culla a bonnet ("something new and pretty") for his pregnant sister, and perhaps the bonnet is symbolic of Mary's veil. And the tinker suggestively refers to Rinthy as "the lady."

"I got some right pretty bonnets... (OD 7)

A few pages later after Culla sends the tinker on his way, Rinthy is shown sitting, "huddled in a ragged quilt her feet gripping the bottom rung of the chair..."

This seems like a possible allusion to the Virgin Mary's Sacred Feet, and perhaps suggestive of the Coronation of Mary in Heaven, when she is shown in many paintings in a rare sitting position, sacred feet exposed.

McCarthy seems to allude to this Mary Standing Motif when Rinthy, after her long first day looking for the chap, says, "Lord...I've not sat hardly today." (59)

Rinthy's "roselit bone" on Page 59 also suggests the common linkage, especially in the Middle Ages, between roses and the Virgin Mary.

I haven't gone very far into the novel yet (second reading), but I recall Rinthy is always barefoot and Culla refers to her as the girl who is always wearing a blue dress.

Peter

Woman of the Apocalypse glass 8/9/2008
THE VIRGIN

"What such a figure represents is the benign, protecting power of destiny. The fantasy is a reassurance -- a promise that the peace of Paradise, which was known first within the mother's womb, is not to be lost; that it supports the present and stands in the future as well as in the past (is omega as well as alpha); that though omnipotence may seem to be endangered by the threshold passages and life awakenings, protective power is always and ever present within the sanctuary of the heart and even omnipotent within, or just behind, the unfamiliar features of the world.

"One has only to know and trust, and the ageless guardians will appear." (Joseph Campbell, "The Hero With a Thousand Faces" 59)

"Goodness will find the little boy. It always has. It will again." (The Road)

Peter

Woman of the Apocalypse glass 8/15/2008
All I know is something like a bird
within her sang
All I know she sang a little while
and then flew on (Bird Song, Grateful Dead)


Joseph Campbell's chapter "The Ultimate Boon" in "The Hero" helps explain some of the mystery surrounding Rinthy, her leaking breasts and her lost son in Outer Dark.

Campbell discusses the "body-destruction fantasies that assail the child when it is deprived of the mother breast," and, "Anxieties for the integrity of its body, fantasies of restitution, a silent, deep requirement for indestructibility and protection against the 'bad forces from within and without..." (149)

He says that the "supreme boon desired for the Indestructible Body is uninterrupted residence in the Paradise of the the Milk That Never Fails" and the "Soul and body food, heart's ease, is the gift of 'All Heal,' the nipple inexhaustible."

The chap obviously never enjoys that uninterrupted residence and is helpless against the bad forces from within and without.

(If you hear that same sweet song again
will you know why?
Anyone who sings a tune so sweet
is passing by....(Bird Song)

When Rinthy encounters the old lady butter churner and her calculating husband in OD, this seems to have some resonance with Campbell's discussion of the Hindu account of the primordial battle between the titans and the gods for the liquor of immortality in which the Milky Ocean of immortal life is churned for its butter for a thousand years.

"I've churned till I'm plumb give out, she said." (OD 103)

The imagery in Outer Dark of the old woman's "stove eye in black and steaming consecration" and a "gout of pale smoke ascended and flattened itself against the ceiling" is somewhat suggestive of the Hindu butter-churning myth when, as Campbell writes, "The first thing to arise from the surface of the sea was a black, poisonous smoke, called Kalakuta, 'Black Summit,' namely the highest concentration of the power of death."

The husband of the butter-churning woman in OD regards her butter as similarly poisonous:

"Caint eat it. Makes me sicker'n a dog." (106)

But Siva bravely drinks the "Black Summit" concoction in the Hindu story, necessary for the churning process to continue and "presently there began coming up out of the inexhaustible depths precious forms of concentrated power." (Campbell 154)

A great battle over the magic elixir erupts in the Hindu myth, and in Outer Dark all hell breaks loose in the house as the woman's precious butter is strewn all over by her hot-tempered husband, who Rinthy sees smiling as she flees the bedlam, only to encounter another old woman to whom she confesses her secret and the "inexhaustible nipple" motif is in exhausting high gear with talk of paps, sows, milk, nursing, buttermilk and so on.

A number of Campbell's elegant sentences are suggestive of Rinthy, who is shown late in the novel as serene and doe-like, full of grace in a garden of unspeakable horrors.

Says Campbell: "The prodigious gulf between those childishly blissful multitudes who fill the world with piety and the truly free breaks open at the line where the symbols give way and are transcended."

..."She is mother, sister, mistress, bride. Whatever in the world has lured, whatever has seemed to promise joy, has been the premonitory of her existence -- in the deep of sleep, if not in the cities and forests of the world. For she is the incarnation of the promise of perfection; the soul's assurance that, at the conclusion of exile in the world of organized inadequacies, the bliss that once was known will be known again..."

..."and after awhile little sister was sleeping." (OD 238)

Don't cry now
Don't you cry
Don't you cry
anymore

Sleep
in the stars
don't you cry
dry your eyes
on the wind
........Bird Song

Peter

Woman of the Apocalypse glass 8/15/2008
She says, "I am content when wakened birds,
Before they fly, test the reality
Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings;
But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields
Return no more, where, then, is paradise?"
(Wallace Stevens, Sunday Morning)

Outer Dark is replete with Biblical resonance and grim parodies. The glade where Rinthy opens herself to the experience of grace, surrenders to the spirits and falls asleep is somewhat suggestive of the Place of Dormition:

The Catholic theologists, Roman Catholic Church and Eastern and Oriental Orthodox churches, all believe Mount Zion to be the place where Virgin Mary slept for the last time before she and her soul were both taken to Heaven. Therefore, this place is held as highly sacred. On the top of this cliff was the Dormition Abbey in Jerusalem erected. At the basement of the Abbey you would find the statue of Virgin Mary, sleeping.

((Incidentally, today, Aug. 15, is the Feast of the Assumption which has a double object: (1) the happy departure of Mary from this life; (2) the assumption of her body into heaven. It is the principal feast of the Blessed Virgin.))

Peter

Woman of the Apocalypse Candy Minx 8/16/2008

We were drivng through New Jersey when lookingout the window I saw a giant metal statue of a woman with arms outreaching. I turned to Stagg and asked, "What is that? Mary Magdelene?"

Apparently there is a fellow who had a vision and got inspired and built a huge metal statue of the Virgin Mary and tours around with it or lends it to towns. I tried to find info online when I got back to my desk, but all I could find was this picture.

I also saw, and I think maybe you did too...a huge white cross outside of Knoxville. I mean like 20 stories or such. Made out of aluminum siding. I looked at it languidly as the bus drove by. I wondered...is it advertising a church or housing material? I asked Wes when I arrived and he said, in classice Wes styel "Well, yes."

And then when we were driving to the mountain he pointed out another one. Fascinating.

Reading your last post or so, what I free associated...and that is what I mostly do when reading some of your posts Peter...things go gliding into my head...I thought of Tess and when she is churning butter it won't take. And the farmer wife said last time that happened a dairy maid was in love. Tess is horrified at being outted. But the farmer husband says, no last time that happened the churn was broken.
I also thought of the last page/ending of Grapes of Wrath when the woman breastfeeds the man to give him strength.

Woman of the Apocalypse glass 8/16/2008
Candy: I saw that huge white cross outside of Knoxville and wondered about it as well. Striking image. I'm going to check out those associations you made regarding the butter churning.
................

An' I seed her first a-smokin' of a whackin' white cheroot,
An' a-wastin' Christian kisses on an 'eathen idol's foot:

—Rudyard Kipling (1892) On the Road to Mandalay

McCarthy likes to make plays on words and his books seem full of that sort of thing. The dried grapevine described as "some rare cheroot" that the woman smokes in The Road is possibly another instance of this with McCarthy perhaps making a play on the Greek word charitoo, defined as:

1. to make graceful
1. charming, lovely, agreeable
2. to peruse with grace, compass with favour
3. to honour with blessings

McCarthy describes the root-like cigar as "slender" and the wife who is smoking it as "elegant."

Charitoo also has Biblical implications as it is used to describe the nature of Mary's grace at the Immaculate Conception:

In Lk 1:28 the archangel hails her as, "full of grace." Most versions today do not use that rendering, but greatly weaken it. Yet it is the correct translation as we can see from the Magisterium (Pius XII, Fulgens Corona, AAS 45, 579, and constant use of the Church) and also from philology.

For the Greek word in the Gospel is kecharitomene. It is a perfect passive participle of the verb CHARITOO. A perfect passive participle is very strong. In addition, charitoo belongs to a group of verbs ending in omicron omega. They have in common that they mean to put a person or thing into the state indicated by the ROOT. Thus leukos means white, so leukoo means to make white. Then charitoo should mean to put into charis. That word charis can mean either favor or grace. But if we translate by favor, we must keep firmly in mind that favor must not mean merely that God, as it were, sits there and smiles at someone, without giving anything. That would be Pelagian: salvation possible without grace. So for certain, God does give something, and that something is grace, our share in His own life. So charitoo means to put into GRACE. But then too, kecharitomene is used in place of the name "Mary." (Mary's Immaculate Conception, Father William G. Most)

Peter

Woman of the Apocalypse glass 8/16/2008
Death through Eve, Life through Mary

"I'd take him with me if it weren't for you. You know I would." (The wife/mother, The Road Page 56 pb)

For, as St. Irenaeus says, she "being obedient, became the cause of salvation for herself and for the whole human race."(6*) Hence not a few of the early Fathers gladly assert in their preaching, "The knot of Eve's disobedience was untied by Mary's obedience; what the virgin Eve bound through her unbelief, the Virgin Mary loosened by her faith."(7*) Comparing Mary with Eve, they call her "the Mother of the living,"(8*) and still more often they say: "death through Eve, life through Mary."(9*)

"Oh, she said, I am so glad to see you. She would talk to him sometimes about God." (TR 286)

When the Child Jesus was lost and they had sought Him sorrowing, His parents found Him in the temple, taken up with the things that were His Father's business; and they did not understand the word of their Son. His Mother indeed kept these things to be pondered over in her heart.

"Are you one of the good guys?"
...He looked at the sky. As if there were anything there to be seen. He looked at the boy." (TR 282)

..."Are you carrying the fire?
Am I what?
Carrying the fire.
You're kind of weirded out aren't you? (TR 283)
.................

V. Mary the sign of created hope and solace to the wandering people of God

68. In the interim just as the Mother of Jesus, glorified in body and soul in heaven, is the image and beginning of the Church as it is to be perfected is the world to come, so too does she shine forth on earth, until the day of the Lord shall come,(304) as a sign of sure hope and solace to the people of God during its sojourn on earth.

NOTES: DOGMATIC CONSTITUTION ON THE CHURCH, Chapter 8

Woman of the Apocalypse glass 8/26/2008
The final pages of The Road share some situational parallels to the Gnostic "Kephalia of the Paraclete" story with its Prophet Mani and the coming of the Holy Spirit. The woman in TR seems to play the role of the feminine aspect of spirituality as the Comforter/Consoler in the Gnostic text with the boy being suggestive of prophet Mani as the receptive vessel.

The Paraclete imagery also ties in nicely with the man's mystical death ("measured from the first" in his last dream comes directly from one Paraclete story I read). Further, it is suggestive of the Paraclete story and speaking in tongues when following the man's death the boy "held his cold hand and said his name over and over again." (a nice contrast to the boy's loving and heartrending gesture comes often in Outer Dark with its recurring namelessness theme such as when the bearded one says to Culla, "...names die with namers. A dead man's dog ain't got a name" and also when McCarthy describes the child as the "nameless weight in her belly.")

Names and namelessness.

In TR, the man's final dream and death resonate with what Thomas Merton seems to be suggesting in his poem "In Silence" when he invokes the soul to "Be still/listen to the stones on the wall/Be silent, then try/To speak your/Name."

And the soul says it will try to be his own silence but that it is difficult, because "The whole/ world is secretly on fire."

In his biography of Merton, George Woodcock says, "That fire, we sense, is also God's dark light, and perhaps also the flames of the Paraclete that urge men to speak with tongues."

And as the man says in The Road shortly before he dies: "If I'm not here you can still talk to me. You can talk to me and I'll talk to you. You'll see...you'll hear me."

In the Islamic tradition, the coming Paraclete will live eternally with us through his faith and teachings. www.islamawareness.

The Paracletos will be the last prophet, because he will "abide with you forever" and "he will guide you into all truth" (Greek "into the whole truth") and "he shall teach you all things," so there will be no need for any further prophets.

But let's return to the Gnostic interpretation and the Kephalia of the Paraclete and its feminine spiritual presence.

Steven Marshall in his essay the "Coming of the Holy Spirit" says, "The Holy Spirit, like a great wind, blows into our spiritual life with something new, unexpected, and, even if somewhat unsettling, yet as a consoler and comforter that is not of this world."

The Holy Spirit requires a vessel for its manifestation, but it is not a worldly vessel or garment; it is a vessel of consciousness. The Gospel of St. John calls Her "the Spirit of Truth whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth Her not, neither knoweth Her; but ye know Her, for she dwelleth with you, and shall be in you."

The Holy Prophet Mani was such a vessel; even his name means "vessel." Mani received the visit of his Light Twin whom he recognized as the Paraclete, the promised Comforter, three times during his earthly life. In this instance, the coming of the Holy Spirit is a direct mystical experience of a transcendent reality. The Kephalaia of the Paraclete by the holy prophet Mani describes how the Holy Spirit not only looks after the sparks of light on earth, but all of the aeons of the light:

"He first formed her in his inner chambers in quiet and in silence; but when she was needed, than was she called and came forth from the father of greatness; she looked after all the aeons of the light."

...the coming of the Holy Spirit, as an immanent reality in the Gnostic soul, represents not just a beginning but the culmination of Gnosis, both the beginning and the end.


Peter

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by Marty Priola.

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